I have been studying for the CCNA exam a couple hours a day for the last month. I took the exam a few weeks ago and missed it by 24 points. The theory I have no problem with but it was the hands on lab questions (specifically NAT, Frame Relay, and ACL's) that killed me. Packet tracer is obviously too limited for practice and dynagen was great but even with idle PC values set to get a lot of routers running simultaneously would get taxing on my PC. Dynagen with GNS3 also had a lot of bugs. So I am ready to build my own lab, the advice I have recieved in this forum has been great my question is authenticity of cisco equipment. I know there is a lot of counterfeit T1/CSU/DSU in circulation. It is easy to pick the counterfeit WIC's but what about routers like anything in the 2600 family. Maczen posted a great site in another post cablesandkits.com but I was wondering if there was an easy way to tell authenticity of a router or switch other than checking for the hologram and the serial number ect.